Climate management is going to be essential to improve the efficiency and cost of renewable energy and enable rapid decarbonisation of world’s energy generation systems to avoid catastrophic climate change. Ultimately control of our regional weather will be the solution to our greatest problems.

I was making the point that primeval life began changing our planets climate almost from its very first existence and that man as a recent incarnation in evolution has been significantly effecting the climate since we first hunted species to extinction and started cutting down huge swaths of forest to convert to agricultural lands.

Human reactions to climate change cause innumerable secondary feedback loops that occur on every scale as the human population comes under pressure for land, food, water and energy resources:

Demand for food and agricultural land causes clearance of forests and drainage of wetlands both of which involve huge releases of carbon. This in turn causes further warming and increased drought, floods and desertification leading to loss of agricultural land.

In my previous chapters of Explaining the Danger, I laid out the mechanisms behind climate change that are driven by increases in green house gasses. In this post I will try to set out what it all means to us now.

Human population expansion has led to deforestation at an increasing rate, releasing CO2. Agricultural land holds a fraction of the carbon that a forest holds and our agriculture releases methane and nitrous oxide which are even more toxic green house gases. Burning fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas to power, heat, cool and transport us, all lead to build up of green house gases in the atmosphere, which as a result, trap more of the suns energy leading to further heating of the atmosphere and oceans.